The Virtues and Limits of Data-Intensive Methods in Korean History

Speaker: Javier Cha. Moderator: Madeleine Clare Elish, MIT. Abstract: The Cold War ended more than twenty years ago, and the average bandwidth of broadband internet in present-day South Korea is reportedly twenty years ahead of that in the United States. Our identification of East Asian nations as advanced digital societies is a familiar one, but what does this extraordinary societal transformation imply about the legitimacy and relevance of East Asian Studies as a discipline in the twenty-first century? Drawing inspiration from the works of Hans Rosling and Franco Moretti, I aim to destabilize the prevalence of cultural relativism and postcolonial theory in foreign language and a studies. In an era of growing global convergence, I contend, we need to disengage as much as actively learn to appreciate unfamiliar cultures in their own terms. To exhibit the powerful capacity of "distant reading‚Äù in historical studies of unfamiliar regions, I will present some data-intensive visualizations of Korean history which postulate plausible generalizations crisscrossing spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries. Information visualization allows the historian to render massive amounts of historical data into accessible forms of knowledge representation. It also effectively circumvents the problems of excessive essentialism and racism to which the cultural relativists and postcolonial theorists have strongly objected. The challenge for data-intensive methodologies in historical studies, then, is the undeniable pluralism of historical knowledge and the subjectivities inherent in our research design. By which objective standards do we define the spatiotemporal scope of our projects and by which epistemological models do we construct our historical knowledge?

Comments (0)

It looks like no one has posted a comment yet. You can be the first!

You need to log in, in order to post comments. If you don’t have an account yet, sign up now!

Responsive design is the web communities preferred approach for dealing with the compatibility issues caused by the great diversity of video viewing devices in use. TechTV have expanded its support for hosting videos (video <iframe> embedding) in pages configured for responsive delivery. Visit any video you own that has embedding enabled (or enable it temporarily)

TechTV now offers simplified collaboration upload features. These features are visible to owners and administrators of Protected collections (any collection can be upgraded to Protected status by its owner or administrators.) Registered TechTV users can be added to a Protected collection for a course by adding their names to the Collaborators user list. Appointed users can

We’ve gotten some great tips from folks to help you think about how to make your videos better. Take a look at what people are saying: Lack of high-quality audio in informal recording – this can be easily addressed by using a lavalier (clip-on) microphone – makes all the difference if people can hear what’s

The much-anticipated Code of Best Practices for Fair use in Academic and Research Libraries was released today and is available at: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/code-of-best-practices-fair-use.pdf The MIT Libraries participated in the focus groups leading up to the creation of this document. This code joins a group of successful best practices in fair use documents coordinated by Peter Jaszi